Juliette Givhan

Gossypium

I have a joke for you What is the only plant that grows When you feed it blood? The cotton tree.

Did you laugh?

I’ve been thinking a lot about ancestry lately,as I’m stuck still in the trap of an existential early 20s.

I’ve been thinking about who I would have been on the continent,if I should do like the diaspora— pledge my allegiance to an idea of homeI’ll never be able to corroborate— claim Ghana, or Nigeria or Cote de Ivoire as the place before the chains

(my last name is French, after all.)

I took Anthropology in collegeand my professor told the class thatAncestry.com, really any DNA testing kit,was full of shit,and a door closedand my heart brokeall over again.

There were two white peopleat my family’s Christmas last year.They were the only people who got23andMe kits.

In the first creative writing class I ever took, the teacher asked everyone to go around the room, answer what our names meantwhat story they told

Givhan… where does that come from?

Slavery. I’ve been thinking about the ancestors as I write a book influenced by myths from a country that colonized a good chunk of the world, ones I’m familiar with because they were what got taught.

I think about them when there’s an uptick on Black twitter of posts saying shit like:

Buck up y’all, they’re dancing in the Kingdom, filled with joy at what you get to dowithout them chains. Make their sacrifice worth it. Make them proud.

(or whatever fits in 120 characters.)

I took a class on African Religionand almost holy disregarded the unitson Catholicism and Christianity, preferring the flavor of the ATR tales, like the one where a chicken helps create the world:

Obatala climbs down a gold chainand scatters sand from a snail shell. He releases the bird to go bat shit—wherever it kicksa sandstorm of hills and valleys follows—and the world began.

(I think I should stop eating chicken)

I like to think of the Orishas as my ancestorswhen the flesh and blood realityof historical violenceon bodies that look like mine starts to consume me.

I think of Obatala and the black catbrought to a creation myth—whose only job was to curl up beside him, keep him company in a new made world—and I see a way of life where I don’t have to be alone.

I think of Olokun livid as fuck, drowning half the new made worldbecause a man was too stupid to ask her permission to enter and terra form her kingdom—and I don’t feel the history of Black women powerless,raped and separated from their families.

I think of Shango and how fucking sicka Black god of thunder must be—Static Shock meets John Henry meets Jesus

(but obviously not white-washed Jesus)

and I feel strong knowinghe could beat the absolute shit out of Zeus, if it came to it.

But then I think of the golden chain Olorun allowed Obatala to hang off the edge of the sky in the first place—

find myself shackled to the same kind of narrative.

So I’ve been thinking about ancestry a lot, but also about theft.

The continental kind. The kind so huge it can’t be replaced by reparations

(though it’s a good fucking place to start)

The kind that has punched a holein the fabric of this history,

a loss so permanent it’s opened a pit in me

that no number of stories could ever fill.

An Homage Of My Father

I.

My mother told me once,when I asked why I never knewAlabama soil. Blackness. The richness of my place on this earthin this tree,

a story about walking with my father and the truck that drove by and the people inside who slowed downto throw bricks at them.

I asked Did you throw them back,teach them a lesson?and her mouth said the no her eyes couldn’t,busy as they were saying something in a language I didn’t understand then,horrors I couldn’t pronounce as a child in a dialect unused to the flavor of lynching,my white teeth in this black mouth unable to let the knowledge of death slip through its gaps.

II.

My father is as Black as I like to imagine the soil in that place we were taken from.

III.

The things I know about my father, are that he used to go to movies with friends, where one person would buy the ticketand let the others in through the exit

that he learned how to drive using a friend’s carbecause no one in our family owned one,used to cheat at cards, palm them, have one up his sleeve to rig the game,that he walked 5 or more miles a dayto get to a bus that would take him to a segregated school,

that he grew up using an outhouse, no indoor plumbing,and that his parents were sharecroppers,his father died young.

I know my father has a bad back from teaching soldiersto jump out of helicopters,that the VA hospital gives out cortisone shots in the years it takes between insurance claims and surgery,

that he joined the Air Force to get out of a South so deep and dark, he still won’t talk about it,won’t acknowledge that some part of me is curious what part of her might belong down there with the ones who never left.

I know my father had a brother who died in a motorcycle accidentone who’s a truckerone who calls occasionally,another that totaled my father’s car while he was deployed in Germany,another that stopped on a highway in Seattle, threw the car with my mother and my father and himself into reverse, to take the exit he’d overshot

I know he still talks to Shirley and one other sister, Ernestine, I think,that another sister diedunknown.

I know he married a white woman, had three brown daughters,that he takes care of four catsand puts money in my account when I get scared I can’t afford to be alive,

I know he didn’t tell my mother about his family reunion two summers ago,that he was silent as she yelled at him when I let it slip.

IV.

I know that some kid called him a niggerat his job and that if I could, I would rip that fucker aparttear the word out of his throat with my teethscratch our history into his body with my nails and it still wouldn’t be enough

to keep it from happening again

to erase the trauma of all the other times he’s been called something I can’t protect him from.

V.

When I told my father about getting kicked out of a class at OSUto make a spot for the white students who hadn’t gotten in and complained, he said, Hang in there, kid

because he knows better than I ever willthat you can’t be Black in this country without having some part of yourselflynched—

VI.

My father is Black as the soil I like to believe exists in that place we were taken from

and he makes me cry sometimes,when I think of all the bad thingsthat could happen to him for existing here.

VII.

My father is Black as new earthin an old world we never got to know,and I thank the god he still believes in but I never could

that he is my father.

Juliette Givhan is a poet and MFA candidate at Oregon State University. She completed a BA in English with a minor in African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. Her writing explores popular culture, memes, myths, and the intersection of identities—all in an attempt to learn how to survive as a Black queer writer in America.